On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 02:08:53PM +0000, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > You mean upstream grub, not upstream libraries.
>
> No, existing pygrub uses upstream libext2fs and libreiserfs, which are
> the official maintained fs libraries, not extracted from grub. It's
> that relationship that I don't want to lose.
>
> Having the same drivers in multiple places is just an unnecessary
> maintenance burden. It is somewhat justified in grub, which is a boot
> loader and which by definition has to run before the full fs is up and
> running. But pygrub has no such excuse.
I do not see much of a maintenance burden, and it does apparently solve
a number of problems with Linux distros and those libraries as has been
noted before. Much more importantly, it provides a simple way to extend
beyond just Linux FS's on Linux, both shorter term (e.g. ZFS) and in the
long term (random fs's on random OS types).
> > > If xen packages are properly built, filesystems will Just Work anyway.
> >
> > On what operating system would that be?
>
> On any OSes which can represent the relationship that the xen package
> requires libext2fs and libreiserfs.
Which don't "just work" on Solaris afaik, for example.
> and I was pointing out that dealing with external dependencies is a
> packaging issue, not an excuse for copying that external functionality
> into the Xen tree.
I would absolutely like to see libfsimage be vendor-supplied eventually.
This would solve all of these issues of needing certain revisions of
libext2fs, etc. The vendor can just ship what they need to. It's the
primary reason that I've gone this way. The existing grub-based
implementations are just what we're using; vendors are free to choose
other methods.
As I said it's provided as a patch to the Xen tree right now for
convenience's sake.
> Vendors are free to write extensions to pygrub already --- reiserfs and
> ext2fs are already supported in such a way, through a modular python
> interface.
I don't think python is perfect for providing a future-proof API/ABI in
this case, never mind that it forces all users to be python-based.
regards,
john
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